Marantz Tape Recorder - 1980’s Made In Japan🇯🇵! - The Best and Most Famous Field Recorder! - Amazing Studio tool!

This is the one to get right here! So many classic demos that ended up outshining the real album tracks were made on this unit. This little thing is such a firery little gem, sounds amazing on acoustic instruments with just the onboard condenser mic! Pounding drums and shining acoustic guitars!

You haven’t lived until you’ve gotten a killer drum or acoustic guitar take on a well functioning but cheap little tape recorder like this one. The tape crunch, the background noise, the flutter, the mic peaking out, it’s all part of an unpredictable cool little moment that can’t be recreated. You can spend so much money looking for the perfect plug-in or piece of outboard gear that claims to sound like tape without including actual tape, or you can buy an actual cheap tape recorder and save yourself from that agony. I’ve played the field with all those fake tape simulator things, and some of them are really cool, but they’re really just compressors and EQ’s that are branded as a tape simulator. I don’t even necessarily think they get totally close to what they’re trying to do, but they can sound good in their own way. It’s like looking for the perfect fake strawberry flavor that for some reason as a rule doesn’t include real strawberries, or you could just eat real strawberries. The world isn’t over yet and there’s still strawberries around, so eat those strawberries while you still can.

I had my tech go through this and make sure it’s ready to go, the tape records and plays back perfectly. The little onboard condenser mic is shockingly killer, point it right at a drumset or and acoustic guitar and you’ll get what you spend hours with plug ins trying to make it sound like. You can run the tape out directly into your DAW or just mic up the little speaker! These are amazing in the studio for making tape prints of existing tracks as well, putting some tape crunch on parts of existing tracks.

This thing is super super clean overall, it works like brand new and is in really good overall condtion. The door eject doesn't activate unless there's a tape in it so you have to kind of pull it up with your fingernail or a tiny guitar pick, but it works totally great with a tape in it no problem. Someone also carved an ID number of some sort on the top (commonplace pre-internet behavior to do that). The buttons and chassis are bright and vibrant, you would never think it’s pushing 40 years old. It has all the things that you'd want out of an epic tape recorder, really cool sound and great in and out options for going back and forth between digital and analog. No corrosion in the battery compartment! The onboard mic sounds great but you can line in a different mic if via the 1/4 inch in, and you can run a line out to your DAW. I don't have the power adapter, but it works great on 3 D batteries and this unit was engineered to have a very long battery life. The power adapters aren't too hard to find. Great little tape machine!